Player Pages

Through the search box at left you can access the single-season player pages. Only the seasons in which the player has enough plate appearances to qualify as a league leader (2.9 per team game) are available. The pages attempt to do a few things that I find myself doing naturally when looking at conventional player stat listings:

Isolate a player's standout stats ("What is he especially good or bad at?").

Compare player stats to the league average ("What was the competition like?").

Orient a single season within a player's career ("Was it a fluke?").

Compare player seasons across eras ("How does McGwire '98 compare with Ruth '27?").

I attempt to do this with charts like the following:

Team, position, and awards won this year, if any.

Seasons played (links).

Superscripts are links to the all-time z-leaderboards and tell you the player's rank on the relevant board.

Graphs show player's year-by-year z-score trend.

Z-percentile tells you how the player's season z-score stacks up against all other player seasons in history (the top 1% can be found on the z-leaderboards).

Stats are ordered by z-percentile so the "best" stats are at the top and the "worst" are at the bottom.

Color fades from black (50th percentile) up to bright green (99th percentile) or down to bright red (0th percentile):

Why Percentile?

Why is it not enough to list z-scores? Due to the nature of baseball, some stats are prone to greater magnitudes of dominance than others. Intentional walks are an example: they are not random occurrences, but strategically given to a certain few players that are perceived as dangerous. Hence, intentional walk z-scores are artificially inflated. For an example, look at George Brett's MVP season. His highest z-score is +4.09 for intentional walks, but his AVG has the highest z-score of all seasons in history among all AVGs (+3.59) and so should appear closer to the top of the listing (since his AVG was "better" than his IBB). Using percentile of the z-score gives us a measure of how good a z-score is for its kind and, as you can see, Brett is 99.99 percentile for AVG and 97.79 percentile for IBBs.

Where to Start

Search for any player by name using the form at the top of this page or try any of the following memorable seasons: